Hump through the doorway

suzanne_slOctober 24, 2011

We're installing a solid woven bamboo floor in the kitchen/dining room, adjoining hallways, and living room of our 1972 house on a subfloor. We removed engineered wood floors from the kitchen/dining area and hallways. The living room has had carpet for the last 35 years.

The problem is that as we came to the open doorway between the dining room and the living room, we realized there is a hump in the floor as you pass from one room to the other. Checking the hall floor on the same line, there is also a hump there.

This hallway had wood flooring until last week and we never noticed this hump before. Of course, the guy who installed that floor used monster staples and bamboo requires delicate 1-1/4" brad nails.

We're wondering if we scrape away the vinyl, maybe 8" on either side of the hump, and even plane away a bit of the underlying plywood, if we could reduce the the hump sufficiently. Is this even a good idea? Is there a better method?

When we sought to reduce these "humps'...what we did was a combination of reducing the crown by excavating it down and gradually building up the slopes on either side. As the previous poster suggests, we used thin plywood and other materials to do that.

Your on vinyl meaning you have a 1/4" underlayment on top of the sub floor you can sand down without doing anything to the structure. That looks to me to you may need no more than that to be within tolerance.

Thanks all. We've been sidetracked for the moment by the discovery of termites in the baseboard on one wall of the living room. Termites are a fact of life in So. CA, but this was a bit of a surprise as we get inspected every year and missed these. In our defense, we have a fireplace and a toy box on that wall, plus the corner has been hidden behind a treadmill for a while. We took the opportunity to pull out the old hearth seating and brick facing around the fireplace and found termite nirvana in the beam over the fireplace too. Yuck. So the flooring was delayed for a bit while we took care of the termites, but we'll be able to resume this week. I'm looking forward to having a complete floor once again.